Unfolding plans 110 – John’s postcard challenge

We’ve got some exciting things going on with our self-service portal. We created it to allow our customers to log their own issues into the system without having to call the Service Desk. Since its implementation its use has grown to a point where it accounts for around twenty three per cent of incidents logged and forty three percent of requests. In short, an incident is where something needs sorting out and a request is when something additional is required. That is about forty percent of all the traffic we have, or at least record (there is a difference), coming through this way.

While it has helped reduce the pressure on the Service Desk telephones it has also made it easier for customers to log the details of their call quickly and (relatively) easily. Having said that, the Service Desk is doing very well, thank you very much. Overall the number of telephone calls has been more or less stable over the year, with monthly differences caused by the number of working days, yet the average time to answer the phone has fallen from thirty seconds to only eleven. Fantastic!

John wrote to tell me that he’s added some new features to the self-service portal under a section called U Fix “IT”. Can you see what he’s done there? In his own words, the ‘section gives you the facility to search for help and once you find an article you’re interested in a page will appear with a description of the help and a guide that you can view on screen and on some articles there will be a link at the top of the page to open the guide as a separate PDF file that you can save for use again.’ The aim is that the section will grow over the coming months.

I’ve had a play with it and it looks great with lots of easy to find useful stuff. Hopefully this will help our customers to improve their own efficiency.

But that is only part of the story. When John let me know of the update he did so in the form of a postcard. Not the kind you buy in a shop and send through the post but rather an electronic postcard. It was from http://philtilden.com/dpc/ and you simply fill in the form with a picture of your choice to create your postcard and then send it by email. An e-postcard kind of defeats the object but it was great fun and a creative way to get his message across.

It was topical too. John has been following my own postcard challenge during July and thought it was a good way to hook me in. It worked and I even used it as my good news story to get the management team meeting underway.

In this day and age when we are bombarded with information, messages and requests all the time it was refreshing that someone had made the effort to try and stand out from the crowd.